Donal Byrne, Head of Automation and Cloud at Triangle talks to us about how VMware vRealize is helping its customers automate

Triangle started on its VMware journey as a server infrastructure partner, but has grown to offer a wide range of VMware solutions. As a VMware Premier Partner Triangle has both an infrastructure and desktop practice – servicing customers across Ireland, UK, US, Asia but its real speciality is in automation – with a focus on VMware vRealize.

Off the back of the exciting announcements around VMware’s Cross Cloud approach and updates to vRealize, we asked Donal Byrne, Head of Automation and Cloud at Triangle about vRealize and why it’s such a crucial part of Triangle’s business.

Why vRealize and why now?

We came on board with VMware’s cloud management platform vRealize very soon after its launch three years ago. We find a lot of companies start out with virtualization and then embark upon a software-defined journey, but struggle to take advantage of the huge amount of flexibility a software-defined approach enables. vRealize gives customers the power they need to manage all of their cloud environments, and make the most of what the software-defined data centre offers. This is where vRealize and the software-defined environment can deliver real value. Advanced approaches to IT, such as DevOps, are becoming more prevalent as teams are using the flexibility of software-defined to enable the agility necessary for a DevOps based application development strategy. At the same time, for a lot of businesses the next logical step in their software defined journey is to build out their infrastructure to take advantage of the public cloud, and automation is a great fit for that.

How does VMware help you deploy vRealize projects?

We’re a VMware Premier Partner, but have a relationship on the Professional Services side as well. The support and commitment we get from VMware under the Partner Professional Services Programme (PPSP) has been excellent. The vRealize projects we’re rolling out aren’t trivial and need a certain level of business maturity and training to deploy them successfully. Under PPSP, we have access to VMware’s senior architects and can work with them to discuss design and architecture points on different projects and it’s invaluable to have them involved.

What benefits have your customers seen through using vRealize?

We worked with VMware to get vRealize up and running in the Almac Group. Top pharmaceutical companies depend on Almac’s software to manage clinical trial screening, randomisation, dosing, drug supply, patient tracking, and clinical outcome assessments. The company came to us looking for a way to reduce its software development time from 14 weeks to six and, ultimately get clinical drug trials processed in a quicker timeframe.

We knew automated deployment of their development environments was the way forward and saw vRealize as the perfect fit for them. The development team can now provision the platforms they need on demand – and start work on new trials within hours of receiving the brief, rather than waiting weeks for the infrastructure to be available. Thanks to this automation, they’ve cut development time down to two weeks – so exceeded the goal for the project.

Another customer, global payments provider, MiFinity, wanted to increase the number of transactions it could process per second to compete in a more demanding market and take on larger sized deals. In a highly-regulated environment, all infrastructure needs to be compliant with industry regulations, so configuration consistency is imperative, but meant all servers needed to be approved internally before use. With vRealize, the team can automate this process by replicating compliant servers for use as and when new infrastructure is needed. This scalability means MiFinity has gone from being able to process two payments a second to 200 a second and be confident it can take on much larger deals.

What’s next on the cards for Triangle’s partnership with VMware?

Security is going to continue to be one of the biggest business priorities. Moving forward, we’ll be dedicating more time to VMware NSX, developing our security practice and seeing where the product fits in with other solutions. This will be in conjunction with growing our Cloud Management practice as we’re already seeing Hybrid Cloud on our customer’s agendas. The AWS, Microsoft Azure and vSphere Integrated Containers announcements from VMworld are significant for a future where ‘Bring Your Own Cloud’ requires the management and governance that vRealize can provide. It might be a while before that’s a reality, but it’s a big step in the right direction from VMware.

Triangle is a virtualization, cloud computing and server consolidation specialist, based in Dublin, Ireland. Triangle started out as an IBM reseller, but began working with VMware soon after the company’s inception. It was one of the first VMware partners in Europe and started working with the company 12 years ago, before it had a strong presence in the region.